![]() Albert Einstein was born on Pi Day (14 March 1879). In 2009, the United States House of Representatives supported the designation of Pi Day. The official celebration begins at 1:59 p.m., to make an appropriate 3.14159 when combined with the date. Pi day is celebrated on March 14 (which was chosen because it resembles 3.14). Pi is the secret code in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Torn Curtain’ and in ‘The Net’ starring Sandra Bullock. Pi is also engraved on a mosaic at Delft University. Pi is represented in the mosaic outside the mathematics building at the Technische Universität Berlin. Pi has been used as a symbol for mathematical societies and mathematics in general, and built into calculators and programming languages. Pi has lately turned up in super-strings, the hypothetical loops of energy vibrating inside subatomic particles. The double helix of DNA revolves around π. Pi can be found in waves and ripples and spectra of all kinds and, therefore, π occurs in colors and music. Pi hides in the rainbow, and sits in the pupil of the eye, and when a raindrop falls into water π emerges in the spreading rings. It keeps on popping up inside as well as outside the scientific community, for example, in many formulas in geometry and trigonometry, physics, complex analysis, cosmology, number theory, general relativity, navigation, genetic engineering, statistics, fractals, thermodynamics, mechanics, and electromagnetism. Its appearance in the disks of the Moon and the Sun, makes it as one of the most ancient numbers known to humanity. Since the exact date of birth of π is unknown, one could imagine that π existed before the universe came into being and will exist after the universe is gone. It is written as pi or as π, symbolically, and defined as ![]() In fact, the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle produces, the most famous/studied/unlimited praised/intriguing/ubiquitous/external/mysterious mathematical number known to the human race. Whether the circle is gigantic, with large circumference and large diameter, or minute, with tiny circumference and tiny diameter, the relative size of circumference to diameter will be exactly the same. ![]() Behind this unexciting observation, however, lies a profound fact of mathematics: that the ratio of circumference to diameter is the same for one circle as for another. We can easily imagine tall narrow rectangles or tall narrow people, but a tall narrow circle is not a circle at all. Before dismissing this as an utterly trivial observation, we note by way of contrast that not all triangles have the same shape, nor all rectangles, nor all people. Mathematicians say that all circles are similar. Some circles may be large and some small, but their ‘circleness’, their perfect roundness, is immediately evident. All circles have the same shape, and traditionally represent the infinite, immeasurable and even spiritual world.
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